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Re: Mathematica 2.0 & Mac sys7

  • To: mathgroup at yoda.physics.unc.edu
  • Subject: Re: Mathematica 2.0 & Mac sys7
  • From: gaylord at ux1.cso.uiuc.edu
  • Date: Thu, 30 Apr 1992 03:04:26 -0500

Robert Sierra writes:

>Actually, the problem you describe may not have anything to do
>with Mathematica (per se).  I've been using Mathematica frequently
>using 80MB virtual partitions to do extensive 100-200 frame
>animations (that often eat up 24 hours of CPU time), and I've never
>encountered the type of crash you're talking about.


 I would suggest that the problem
>is in the operating system, and there may be a simple solution to
>the problem, independent of Mathematica.

  I *strongly* suspect the problem
>is that MMA crashes when 32-bit addressing is enabled, which
>would be the same case regardless of whether you were using
>virtual memory or internal memory.  Try turning it off (if you
>only need a 12MB partition, you don't need 32-bit addressing.
>If this doesn't help, look to your INITs, CDEVs, etc.  I think
>you may find the problem has to do with one of these.

>Suggestions:
>- Try going back to 24-bit addressing -- see if the problem goes
>away.
>- Disable all INITs/CDEVs and try again.
>
>Has anybody else encountered this type of problem?
>If so, Was Virtual Memory enabled?
>      Was 32-bit addressing enabled?
>      What type of Mac was it?
>      Which system version?
>      Which MMA version?
>      What other INITs and CDEVs were active?

=====================================================
i absolutely agree. I  think it is a system 7 problem.its not a Mathematica
problem per se but i would say that its a problem for Mathematica running
under system 7. i don't have much hope that apple will straighten it out
(frankly i don't think they have total control over their os as evidenced
by the successive tuneup fiascos). running under 24 bit is a obviously not
a great solution, though it may be necessary). 

i would say that the system 7 virtual memory is definitely inferior to the
old Connectix (which i was a beta tester for). under system 6, you could
lock the hard drive (we did this in the student lab to prevent people from
loading games and from trashing programs) and still use virtual memory but
under system 7 and apple's virtual you can't.

the 32 bit addressing could well be the problem; but i would guess, that it
lies not in Mathematica itself running alone under 32 bit addressing but
perhaps an init/cdev or application running alongside it under 32 bit
adddressing (possibly even my MacWrite II which was not upgraded for system
7).


can any of the people who have been experiencing the Mathematica crashes
comment on this 32 bit analysis.

i've been contacted by wri about what's happening. i responded as indicated
below.

thanks for anyone wanting to help figure out what's going here.
======================================================================

the response to my note on the net has ndicated that this is a major
problem for mac users. system 7 and even more so system 7 with tuneup 1.1
and 1.1.1 are completely screwing up the program.

it is very, very  common for me to be just sitting around with Mathematica
open but not doing any calcluation and when I decide what to do and click
on a notebook merely to open it i get a "the application Mathematica has
unexpectedly quit due to an error of the type X " where X is any of a
number of different numbers.

other reports to me indicate that the mac version is consuming and not
letting go of enormous amounts of memory (coiuld this be a grabage
collection problem?)

=============================================







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